Psalms preserved in a peat bog for 1200 years
On July 20 2006 Edward Fogarty was cutting peat in Tipperary with a mechanical digger at a place called Faddan More when the back-hoe turned up a sodden block which, with presence of mind, he preserved under wet earth until it could be examined by an expert from the National Museum of Ireland.
Raghnall Ó Floinn, an expert on bog bodies, among other archaeological subjects, identified the block as a psalter from three words legible on a bent-over page: in valle lacrimarum. They are from Psalm 83 (84 in the Book of Common Prayer) and fit the watery place where it had lain since about AD 800: “Blessed is the man whose strength is in thee: in whose heart are thy ways. Who going through the vale of misery use it for a well: and the pools are filled with water.”
It was lucky the book had not been found decades ago, for it would have fallen apart. Its calf-skin vellum pages were preserved by the sphagnum water of the bog but the great problem was to dry them. How it was done is detailed by John Gillis in The Faddan More Psalter. Drying in the air makes the vellum shrink and become brittle. It would be like making breadcrumbs. Freeze-drying wouldn’t do, either. At last, the conservators used a method by which the leaves were soaked in alcohol and then dried in a vacuum.
Today they are preserved in airtight folders kept vertical in a box to prevent their being squashed. A pair of pages is on show at the museum at any one time.
They make up 60 folios, or 120 pages, on which are written all 150 psalms. The peaty picture (right) of a detail is from the beginning of Psalm 72: Quam bonus Israel Deus, “How good is God to Israel.” At the top in the middle can be seen the letters ahel, from Israhel (a spelling of Israel), preceded by a long and a long Irish form of
The script is that beautiful Irish majuscule that we know from the Book of Kells or the Lindisfarne Gospels (since early English scribes learnt letter-forms from the Irish monks). A book written in an earlier form of that regular script but with capital-letter forms, is the Cuthbert Gospel, a manuscript of St John’s Gospel, buried with St Cuthbert himself in 687.
Historians were surprised that the cover of the Faddan More Psalter, like that of the Cuthbert Gospel, was made by a technique from the eastern Mediterranean, used by Coptic Christians. That’s a long way from Tipperary. But (like other sites of the so-called Dark Ages, such as the ship-burial at Sutton Hoo, which preserves a set of lovely 6th-century silver bowls from the Eastern Roman Empire) it shows that trade and culture spread over Europe, often by the high-road of the sea.
Until the Faddan More Psalter was found, no others from Ireland were known to survive from between the early 7th and the 10th century. The survivor is not to my eye particularly beautiful in its peat-tinged fragmentary state.
Its neat cover of leather (lined with papyrus) with three decorative buttons has a flap to protect the contents. It seems to be a cover of convenience, not firmly binding the pages, which sat in five gatherings, for monks to refer to the psalm they wanted to sing or learn by heart (the first task of a monastic life).
Why was it in the peat bog? Dr Gillis thinks it no accident. He wonders if it was a cultural practice to do with boundary marking or an intentional way of disposing of a manuscript that had somehow been torn across (more difficult than tearing a telephone directory in two). We cannot know, but I’m sympathetic to the idea of psalter buried respectfully in a cool bog where “pools are filled with water”, as the psalm says.